EDITOR’S NOTE: We will have an in-depth look into this story later this week. Don’t miss it!

The family of a missing Pickens man is hoping to find out what happened to him sooner than later. After a month of searching, Alex Easterling’s family fears the worst.

It’s been a month since Ashley Martin filed a missing persons report on her son Alex after dropping him off at a Pickens residence. And it has become a life mission to find out what happened to Alex.

“I just want him home. I just want him back,” she said, emotion thick in her voice.

Ashley had just picked 30 year old Alex up from jail that day. He told her to drop him off at a friend’s house, but when she got there, she felt uneasy about the scenery.

“That’s when I started kind of giving him the business I was like, where are we, what is this? Alex, is this a chop shop?” Martin said.

She has not heard from her son again. But she feels him, and that’s why there’s such a sense of dread.

“You can almost feel their pain and feel their struggles,” she said.

After learning how to analyze cell phone data from a law enforcement friend, his mother says she’s got a terrible gut feeling. Her data research seems to show Alex on the porch of the friend’s home, and then just minutes later, it appears to be still for good.

“He ran off the back porch, fell down flat, and the very next phone ping that shows up is at 12:23 a.m., and it’s across the street… this is the property where we were, and this is the phone ping,” she said.

Several professional search teams with dogs came in, but after granting them access to his property, the homeowner revoked it. That shut down any outside ability to search the grounds without the Sheriff’s Department’s help, said Alex’s stepfather Brent. 

“I just took for granted that we were going to have people searching, looking, helping, and to have absolutely none of that, it’s undescribable,” he said.

March says he hopes Alex is simply missing, and not worse off. He said the search is actually bigger than it seems. He says Alex’s case has been entered on NCIC.

“The missing persons report we put out there, It’s nationwide,” he said. “It should be hitting folks’ telephones because we’re doing Crime stoppers. So we’ve done all we can do to try to locate him.”

The public is asked to call Crime Stoppers at 1-888-827-4637 if you have any information on this case.